Note: before anyone pooh-poohs this article for being in a blog mostly about weather and climate, note the description on the masthead. Note also that I have recently experienced cancer in my family as I’m sure many readers have at some time, therefore it is relevant to me, and may be helpful to others, and that’s all that matters. – Anthony
Guest post by David Archibald
Before starting out in climate science in 2006, my main hobby was cancer research. To that end, I had co-invented a cancer drug with two professors from Purdue University, Professor Jim Morre and his wife Professor Dorothy Morre. I went on to lodge a patent on a benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH) drug myself. I still operate in that space. Early in that journey, I was given the draft manuscript of a book on how isoflavones from soy and other legumes modulate the human female hormone system.
That was in 1998. The manuscript had been written by Dr Graham Kelly who had founded a company to commercialise isoflavone supplementation in men and women. Dr Kelly’s journey in cancer research started in the 1980s when a friend with bowel cancer asked him to look into the science of it. Dr Kelly was intrigued by the epidemiological differences in cancer rates between populations. For example, Japanese who migrate to the US go to the US breast cancer rate in a generation. The US breast cancer rate is five times the Japanese breast cancer rate. The difference in cancer rate is not genetic, it is obviously dietary. So what is the difference in diet that is causing the difference in cancer incidence? A big difference is isoflavone consumption. Amongst the Japanese, it is an average of 40 mg per day. The US average is 3 mg per day.
In Western countries, breast cancer and prostate cancer have the same incidence. In women, 11% get diagnosed with breast cancer in their lifetime and 5% die of it. In men, 11% get diagnosed with prostate cancer in their lifetime and 5% die of it. There are very big epidemiological differences in prostate cancer rates. As the following graph shows, the Vietnamese prostate cancer rate is one fortieth of the Western prostate cancer rate:
Defeating the scourge of a lot of common cancers is as simple as changing your diet. It is a bit like Vitamin C. If you don’t get any Vitamin C in your diet, you die of scurvy within three years. Pigs and dogs make their own Vitamin C, and presumably some precursor ape to humans had the ability to make it. Humans must have lost the ability for an evolutionary advantage. There are probably a large number of other plant molecules which we evolved to rely upon in our diet. We might not die in the near term if we don’t get them in our diet, but we suffer an increased incidence of degenerative diseases if we don’t. With respect to the dietary components that might cause the low Vietnamese prostate cancer rate, the national dish of Vietnam is called pho. It is a bowl of noodles and meat with three side dishes – bean sprouts, chillis and mint. The anticancer effect would be the result of synergistic blocking of the tNOX molecule on the external membrane of cancer cells by sulforaphane from the bean sprouts with capsaicin from the chilli peppers, stopping the overproduction of anti-apoptotic proteins and allowing the death receptors to trigger the apoptotic cascade of the caspases.
Back to Dr Kelly’s book, “Hormones with Harmony”. It is 70,000 words and goes into highly readable detail on how the daughter metabolites of isoflavones become human hormones in the body. They then become very useful in evening out the peaks and troughs of the body’s estrogenic hormones: estradiol, estrone and estriol. The book goes into detail on how the plant-derived hormones are beneficial in pms, mastalgia, endometriosis, uterine fibroids, uterine cancer, ovarian cancer, menopausal symptoms, osteoporosis, cardiovascular disease, cataracts, senile dementia and breast cancer. Without being overly technical, it does not talk down to its readers. Earlier this year, I undertook to get it published and it is now available on Kindle for $5 per copy. I do recommend it.
Further to the subject of prostate cancer, there are a number of plant molecules that have an effect on it and BPH. All cancers have tNOX molecules on their external membranes. tNOX is the tumour variant of cNOX, or normal constituent NOX. No plant molecules bind to cNOX but a number bind to tNOX. tNOX has two binding sites. If both are bound to simultaneously, the effect is synergistic. For example, the combination of sulforaphane with capsaicin has twenty times the effect of sulforaphane alone. Another example of synergism is curcumin from turmeric with piperine from black pepper.
David Archibald
December 2012
@ur momisugly krischel says: December 12, 2012 at 8:48 am
Thanks for the explanation of Vitamin C. I was always curious how people in the colder climates managed to get a sufficient amount of them. I am aware that some vegetables have small amounts as well, but the concentration was in the citrus fruits – and those were not universally available.
hormones given to cows that pass into the milk, duh.
the same reason girls mature years ahead of boys in the usa.
Krischel,
I tend to agree with you, and have been on a low-carb diet for years. My doctor put me on it when I weighed 230 pounds and had high cholesterol levels. In six weeks I lost 15 pounds, and the cholesterol dropped 30 points, while I ate all the meat and cheese I could stand. I am now a steady 195 pounds for the last 15 years. That same doctor claimed to have cured certain types of diabetes in patients by getting them on a low-carb diet.
I’m sure, when comparing Vietnamese diet with USA, that the sheer carb intake is much lower in VN than here. The sprouts and chilis could be incidental at best.
” Another example of synergism is curcumin from turmeric with piperine from black pepper.”
I saw a clip recently of a village ‘sage’ in India claiming the virtues of curcumin as pretty much a cure-all. He specifically mentioned cancer.
Most interesting and cogent. It is good to think about other things besides climate. The scientific principles and methods used in science (not pseudoscience) are essentially universal. Most but by no means all life science seems to reinforce the old philosophical idea of the golden mean. Thanks Aristotle. It is always good to remember that natural systems tend to favor balance. Dynamic systems never achieve for very long but the tendency toward it is constant. The golden mean also suggests the need for balance and moderation. Both commodities we humans, at least of late, i.e. our experience base, are short of in far to many aspects of life.
Yes! I’m into this topic also, but had not considered the benefits or magnification effects of the combinations of sulforaphane and tumeric. I was getting the benefit through the silo approach of research findings that recognizes the benefits of them individually. I recommend the site Science Daily to all to open up this channel of science info. You might need such science truth to survive the Maunder Minimum and multidecadal ocean cycle downswings. Of course you will have to budget for this while paying the carbon taxes in support of the opposite policy misdirection plays and propping up the nonprofit for profit ecosystem.
My understanding is that piperine acts in the liver to exhaust a certain enzyme that would otherwise break down curcumin. Hence, the curcumin can get out of the liver and into the general circulation.
Here’s a paper that describes curcumin, capsaicin, and piperine concentration, and their interactions, in serum (in rats).
http://www.icmr.nic.in/ijmr/2010/May/15.pdf
The French drink lots of wine but have lower death rates from liver disease than Brits and Americans.
The Italians eat lots of olive oil and fat but have less obesity related fatal diseases than the Brits and Americans.
The Japanese eat lots of soy and have fewer deaths from certain cancers than the Brits and Americans from the same cancers.
So eat and drink what you like – it is speaking English that kills you.
(Well, some of the AGW “science” is on that level.)
The basis for this is?
Dr Weston Price studied healthy populations in the 1930’s. Populations with no so-called western diseases like diabetes, obesity, heart diseases, cancers, etc. The common thread amongst these many disparate populations was diet. Plain and simple. That is the cure for cancer. Diet.
The key to good diet is ensuring that the body gets all the nutrients it needs to function as designed, and avoiding those “foods” that are more poison than they are food. Soy is in the later category. Firstly, most soy is GMO, and it is actually illegal for producers to label soy as GMO or as not GMO. Soy has never been historically used as a food crop except in times of serious hardship and deprivation. The Chinese revere the crop for its nitrogen fixing ability not for it’s food value. It has only been used as food when it is fully fermented and used as a condiment, ie. soya sauce, miso paste, etc. It was an American who started marketing as a supposedly healthy protein alternative, which it most definitely is not.
One does not get cancers or other chronic disease because one did not have certain pharmaceuticals in ones system. Without rock solid nutrition, one will become diseased to some degree. Read more here:
http://www.westonaprice.org/
More info on Isoflavones
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isoflavones
All plants are chemical factories. Everything a plant “does” is chemical in some way. Isoflavones are just a tiny part of that story. We animals evolved along with plants, including our diets. The pre-agriculture (traditional) diets always included a wide variety of local plant materials. If half of your diet is local, fresh plant material, it makes sense that you would evolve to partially depend on those local fresh plant materials. Remember the hunter-gather diet was half plant, half animal based. Their health was good enough. Their life spans were limited by low calories and lack of infection control. If modern people ate the hunter-gatherer diet (in adequate amounts) they would live far longer and with better health compared to the sugar snack, potato chip diet people.
On the topic of health two American cardiologists have just published a book where they claim cholesterol is not the cause of heart disease. They start off with a convincing “roughly half the people who get heart disease have high cholesterol, which means that roughly half the people who get heart disease have low cholesterol”. Anyway thanks David/Anthony for the interesting article. Where ever you look the science isn’t settled.
Cancer is driven by many factors, some inter-related, and no matter what you do – you can’t avoid the cancer risk entirely. Same goes for heart disease…. But you can try to reduce the risk or buy some time so to speak.
– Genetics
– Hormones
– Diet
– Stress
– Exercise
– Environment (Exposure to certain things…)
– Age
– Abnormal interrruption of natural health and reproductive cycles.
I’ve known about a dozen folks in my 44 years who have died from cancer of some kind. As I think back to them, several common variables stand out:
1. Avoidance of the sun – indoors, sun blocks and sun glasses. (This one dominates…)
2. Religious buy-in into the low fat high carb diet – and vegan diets. (This one as well…)
3. Sedentary life style – house chair, car chair, office chair. (Same as above…)
4. Night shift work, day time sleep, abortion, stomach stapling, hard core drug use, etc. (Varies among a few individuals…very anecdotal….)
The interesting thing is that #1, goes right to the point of the OP’s article.
Hormones…
Vitamin D ladies and gentlemen IS a hormone. Deficiency of Vitamin D as more and more studies are showing seems to not only have a cascading effect – but a cascading effect that branches out into all kinds of different areas of bodily health.
– Immune System (Flu and Cancer)
– Bone
– Cardiovascular (Heart and Diabetes)
– Respiratory (Flu, Pneumonia, Asthma)
– Mental Health (Sleep, Memory, Dementia)
As to myself, I’ve taken two steps in the past 4 years.
1. 3000-4000 IUs of Vitamin D per day starting back in November 2008. Since then my bones have felt fantastic. I’ve had one case of flu at the most though I still get colds. A couple nasty warts I had literally detached themselves and took a flying leap.
The downside? Short term memory loss. My mother, myself, and two friends all report the same exact side effect – short term memory loss. At first it’s bothersome – but then again we remind ourselves – Vitamin D is a hormone. So we stop whining.
The other downside is the return of dandruff…
2. Total abandonment of high fructose corn syrup. My diet is best described as a high fat high sugar diet.
I decided back in April to at the very least eliminate high fructose corn syrup from the sugar part of the equation. I literally went cold on it…
6 weeks later, IBS that I had been struggling with for a decade – vanished! Poof! Gone!
I’m still on a high fat high sugar diet – but at least now my sugars are relegated to sugar, corn syrup, and sugar via starches from chips, breads, etc.
Will I be free of heart disease and cancer for life? Doubt it? Have I bought some time? Probably.
The science seems to indicate that once past 40 – age plays a role as well. And I doubt there’s much we can do about that.
Wish me a happy birthday everyone…(12/11/2012)
=8-)
I can’t live forever and I suspect I wouldn’t want to. But I’d like to live well until the day I fall over after a particularly good glass of wine.
Thanks for this, and who should care if it is not climate? One day, clear-thinking willing, CAGW will be as historical as wtichcraft. Then we’ll talk about other things that clear-thinking will help, like cancer.
Good on yer.
@brians356: Wow, great results for you! I only realized that the calories in/calories out trope was a bunch of hooey in 2007, so it’s only been around 5 years for me, but the dramatic reduction of carbohydrate, and recently the increase in fat intake (to try and get into nutritional ketosis), caused a huge change in my triglyceride/HDL ratio, blood pressure, blood sugar, and of course, the 50 pounds I’m not carrying around any more. Unfortunately, the HMO I work for still promotes the low-calorie/low-fat/exercise advice, and it pains me to see the deleterious effect it has on our members, but one day, people will look back at the calories-in/calories-out and realize that it’s a silly as the idea of controlling the thermostat of the planet with a trace gas used by plants to grow 🙂
Thus far, my experience has been about 80-90% of the benefit just comes from sheer carbohydrate reduction, and the last percent can be addressed by omega3/6 ratios (grass fed butter, baby), higher intake of fat (75-85% of calories), and some minor supplementation (magnesium, zinc). Jimmy Moore (notable low-carb blogger and zealot) got me clued into the whole nutritional ketosis thing (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc96Lk1VVS4).
I’m not sure if the world is prepared to sustain its entire population on healthy animal fats and meat, but I’m hopeful that one day, the powers that be will abandon their promotion of cereals and grains, and that our chronically increasing health care costs will fall dramatically as we avoid the “diseases of civilization” caused by our carbohydrate intake 🙂
“I think that thousands of years ago people lived to be hundreds of years old. Then the agricultural revolution happened and life span declined up to 90% because the human body is not optimized for the new diet.”
Well, I think the general limit of human lifespan peaks around 114 -> all of our improvements to life expectancy (lower infant mortality, treatment of chronic diseases as we age), haven’t moved the bell curve up, they’ve simply hit a wall somewhere in the hundred-teens.
http://singularityhub.com/2012/02/14/while-average-lifespans-increase-114-remains-a-stubborn-and-mysterious-upper-bound-why/
“The difference in cancer rate is not genetic, it is obviously dietary.”
A false dichotomy. If it is not genetic, it is environmental. “Dietary” is part of environment, but not its totality. There are a gazillion cultural/environmental differences between Japanese and Americans, any one of which could cause a difference.
Certainly diet plays a role in cancer rates. But is the large increase in rate of cancer in western countries the result of lifestyle, or better diagnostics?
Cancer research is continually discovering new ways of finding cancer. Imaging equipment, lab work, and DNA sequencing are continually improving.
It would be interesting to compare Viet Nam’s diagnostic system with the western world’s system.
I have the beans and the chili in my customary bowl of Texas Red chili. Maybe I should add a pinch of mint to my recipe…
Intended to include link to pre-agriculture diet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleolithic_diet
I never eat dairy, sugar, oils, soda, candy or fast foods. I do eat fish, red meat, some whole wheat, fruits, garden vegetables, onions, peppers, fresh legumes, etc. I do eat hamburger once a weak. You don’t have to adhere perfectly to the diet, but try it. I’m far healthier than most people my age, with no health issues at all. My weight is exactly where it should be. I’ve been told I look much younger than most people my age. Also, I am smart enough to see the global warming issue for what it is. A grotesque political hatchet job by a mob of crazed city dwellers. Eventually the farmers will decide to stop sending food to the city dwellers and that will be the end of global warming.
Krischel,
That original regime low-carb came in my 30s, I am now 58 and, while still maintaining ideal weight for my height, and excellent blood pressure, the LDL and cholesterol are not so easy to keep low, partly because I do eat more carbs nowadays than I should. Buy by cutting down on dairy fat (I can live on cheese and milk!) I am now reversing those lipid trends again as well. Doctor said “fat-free milk only!” but I cheat and mix 3:1 ratio of 0% with 1% milk, to yield “~1/4%” milk, no longer blue colored and has enough solids to satisfy the craving.
Phooey on pho. Since I’m deathly allergic to peppers (capsaicin), a diet including peppers would indeed keep me from developing cancer, since I would die very quickly from anaphylactic shock. But this is great news for people who have no allergy/sensitivity to peppers. And I’m going to convince the women in my life to use more soy products.
I wonder if the soy-based protein powders (e.g. Trader Joe’s brand) are a satisfactory source of whatever benefits soy has to offer? I mix that protein powder with a ripe banana and orange juice in the blender for a quick meal. Yummy!
I think there are strong parallels in the dynamics of climate science and health science. It is my opinion that mainstream scientists confuse cause with effect. i.e. CO2 is an effect of rising ocean temps vs. C02 causes rising temps. I suspect that high LDL cholesterol is not the cause of heart disease, but it is an effect of whatever is the real cause of heart disease. Trying to control the effect vs. the cause is not especially productive.
All things in moderation, including D3.